July 14, 2009

Here's a National Journal article by Stuart Taylor on how Sotomayor and two other judges almost got away with making the Ricci case disappear without their ten fellow judges on the Second Circuit hearing about it. Sotomayor's old mentor, Jose Cabranes, read about it in his local New Haven newspaper and blew his stack at their tactic, which is the only reason it didn't disappear down the Memory Hole.

Presumably, Cabranes, a New Havenite, didn't feel like taking a chance on burning to death due to incompetent New Haven firemen.

Tuesday live update: Orrin Hatch is asking some tough questions about the Cabranes scandal, to which Sotomayor is not replying well, but now Sen. Hatch is rambling off into a speech instead of following up with tougher questions, and now has given up. And now it's time for lunch. Man, the action is just non-stop!---Anyway, I then had to go out and couldn't catch the thrill-packed conclusion of Tuesday hearings, so did anything interesting happen?

59 comments:

White Americans better get used to this. As their numbers dwindle, this will become the norm. Whites in South Africa are used to having black political hacks operating as judges stacked against them. Whites down there no longer expect justice from the courts. The main worry of whites is to try and stay out of the legal system, since spending time in jail is usually a death sentence (rape and aids, or outright murder).

In Zimbabwe the judiciary basically does not exist any more. They are just a collection of bureaucrats taking direct orders from Comrade Bob. I’ve never heard of any courts in the other black countries.

The judicial system operating in western society is really an exception and not the norm. The norm is that state employees exercise judgment according to their will or the whim of the local ruler. Or even if you have the semblance of a court, it is really just a political outpost.

Not only is this woman a stone cold racist and a dangerous judicial activist, but this article demonstrates that she is lazy as well.I can’t even suffer through her hearing anymore. All the Democrats falling all over themselves to congratulate her, it’s as if she cured cancer; and not one tough question thus far from the spineless Republicans.

Instead, Lindsay Graham basically told her as long as she reads her prepared statements without stuttering too much she’s all but confirmed.

I don't buy the conspiracy theory. Indifference to the outcome, confidence that their arguments were unassailable, a genuine understanding that quotas are perfectly acceptable and that a mere "disparate impact" amounts to proof of discrimination, all of these could be reasons, but the desire to keep it a big secret just doesn't seem likely. Frankly,it seems too Machiavellian for Sotomayor.

It is somewhat of a foregone conclusion that Sotomayor will be nominated to the Supreme Court. What the Republicans should be doing is raising troubling questions about her connections to Ricci, AA, and her ethnic identity politics. This could be something that comes back to haunt the Dems.

The Democrats spend an enormous amount of energy organizing around the courts. If the Republicans were smart (if my aunt had balls) what they would do is give up on abortion and focus on race. The first they can't win, the second they can win. Sotomayor will be the new Scalia in reverse.

Founded in 1709 by the Puerto Ricans, a genetic isolate some believe to have originated in what is now Turkmenistan, they carry the Anus 12 haplogroup type and are as unique an ethnic group as one can find. Some ethnospecialists believe they are the descendants of the survivors of Atlantis but evidence is scarce.

White Puerto Ricans, heh. Where did you ever come up with such nonsense?

He can no more be "white" than he can be a Jew! Or so I learned in the comment section at iSteve.

/Guarenteed: she's a Jewess//This is Albright, v2.0///It will come out after confirmation////What's her father's bloodline again? Oh, right, nobody knows.

Arterton described the much-talked about choices between career and family as “rotten choices, and I think for the most part that men don’t have to make them.”

This gender gap has clearly affected the demographics of the legal profession, as Arterton showed her audience through various statistics: Far fewer women with two or more children than men in the same position have climbed high on the law ladder; even today, only about 20 percent of U.S. District judges are female.

“In my view, there is simply no reason in this day and age why these numbers aren’t pushing 50 percent,” Arterton said.

--- end excerpt ---

My mom worked part-time because she thought she wanted to be involved in raising her kids. Talk about false consciousness. Surely our agents of hope and change in congress can legislate towards a less sexist world. I guess in the meantime, we'll have to keep relying on the Janet Artertons to improve society from the bench.

The purpose of these kinds of hearings isn't to ascertain the suitablility of the nominee. It's to get Senators some face time in the national media. If they were really interested in the nominee they would spend more time asking questions and less time making speeches.

The decision to put So-So on the court has already been made, and if she avoids providing opponents with a good sound bite it's done.

This blog is hilarious. When will you clowns realize that not one person cares a hoot about your comments? If you spent some time trying to better your own lives instead of looking for scapegoats for you failures, you would be better off. Hey Sailer, when are you going to start selling books, trinkets and install a PayPal donate button? I challenge you to publish this post! :)

What her confirmation hearing ought to demonstrate is that Sotomayor is not suitable for the Supreme Court. But it won't. Largely because of what it will demonstrate instead: the gross intellectual cowardice and mediocrity of the US Senate (the same for the vast majority of its members as individuals) as a deliberative body.

"This blog is hilarious. When will you clowns realize that not one person cares a hoot about your comments? If you spent some time trying to better your own lives instead of looking for scapegoats for you failures, you would be better off. "

yeah, we are such losers we regularly troll blogs we don't even enjoy reading.

Anonymous said... This blog is hilarious. When will you clowns realize that not one person cares a hoot about your comments? If you spent some time trying to better your own lives instead of looking for scapegoats for you failures, you would be better off. Hey Sailer, when are you going to start selling books, trinkets and install a PayPal donate button? I challenge you to publish this post! :)

This blog is hilarious. When will you clowns realize that not one person cares a hoot about your comments? If you spent some time trying to better your own lives instead of looking for scapegoats for you failures, you would be better off.

Uhm, could you possibly be more disingenuous? C'mon, try, you can do it.

Eh -- you don't get it. Republicans number only 40 in the Senate. Voters themselves decided they'd rather have, say Al Franken than Norm Coleman. Or hereditary rules Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and so on in the Senate. Along with Boxer and Feinstein.

This is because White Women plus Blacks plus Hispanics (plus Gays, numerically insignificant, culturally and wealth wise hitting above their weight) is a majority. Not an crushing one, but one nevertheless, aided by a female-oriented media, academia, and bureaucracy.

Sotomayor is getting confirmed, because voters elected guys like Franken just for that reason. Because they elected Obama instead of McCain. Who would have made appointments but not this bad.

Pols will blow whichever way the punishments and rewards blow, which means whichever side has the most fear, intimidation, and ruin on the one side and rewards on the other.

Whose career will be over voting for Sotomayor? Feinstein? Al Franken? Boxer? Please. Until and unless, the tools of intimidation and fear are used by a populist organization against the interests of the majority of the people, such as publication of unflattering to damaging facts about pols, their families, their backers, their backers families, and so on, along with harassing investigations and ethics complaints, lawsuits, and other punishment, this will continue.

Politics at it's core is very base and primitive. Whichever side has the most fear and rewards, absent crushing majorities, wins.

IF every Republican votes against Sotomayor, she still wins confirmation because voters across America voted just for such an outcome. By a bare majority, but there it is. Absent fear and intimidation (say fear of one's misdeeds, that of family misdeeds, and backers being ruined) even if most of the nation polls negative on Sotomayor, she still gets confirmed.

You'll never get philosopher-king Senators disinterestedly making decisions according to high principle because human beings are not built that way. If you want to sink Sotomayor, go out and make examples of say, pols who back her strongly by organizing the same sort of thing done to Palin and Joe the Plumber. [According to Ace of Spades, Levi Johnson is now "Ricky Hollywood" and set for his own reality show.]

" Anonymous said... This blog is hilarious. When will you clowns realize that not one person cares a hoot about your comments? If you spent some time trying to better your own lives instead of looking for scapegoats for you failures, you would be better off. Hey Sailer, when are you going to start selling books, trinkets and install a PayPal donate button? I challenge you to publish this post! :)"

Hey, Pot,

Pleezed t' meecha!!!

Um...if not one person cares, then why are YOU here bothering to tell us about it? Because you care? Ah, sniff, you really DO care!! You sweetie!!

"Whites down there no longer expect justice from the courts. The main worry of whites is to try and stay out of the legal system, since spending time in jail is usually a death sentence (rape and aids, or outright murder)."

"The Democrats spend an enormous amount of energy organizing around the courts. If the Republicans were smart (if my aunt had balls) what they would do is give up on abortion and focus on race. The first they can't win, the second they can win. Sotomayor will be the new Scalia in reverse."

We lost that battle in the 1970s when the "conservative movement" and the GOP invited in the Neo-Cons and the "Christian Right".

The Rapture Bunnies are only interested in fighting lost battles (school prayer, abortion) or really, really stupid lost battles (Creationism). That, and giving their blood and treasure to serve Israel based on some really hare-brained theology.

The Neo-cons aren't going to encourage them to change, obviously. They like the GOP and the "conservative movement" just fine the way it is: impotent and clueless.

Why fight a battle you can win to save your race, when children are being taught the evils of Evolution in public schools? Think of the children! Oh, why won't you think of the children???

"I can't believe that you spambots are STILL repeating your moronic talking points even now, as the Democrats show us all how running a country into the ground is really done."

I can't believe that you spambots are STILL repeating your moronic talking points even now, that it is has become bleeding obvious that there is no substantial difference between the two parties.

Are the two parties different on immigration, racial quotas, hate crime laws, any other issues that directly affect white group identity and interests? Hell no.

Sure Obama is bad news but an Obama presidency was made inevitable by Bush/Cheney's 8 years of misrule, incompetence, and giving the country away to their friends in KBR, Halliburton, and the various other GOP-allied parasites who got rich off of the "war on terror".

Just because Obama has brought in a new set of crooks to steal us blind, does not make the old set of crooks "better" in hindsight. The acceptance of the first set of crooks leads inevitably to the second set of crooks.

This is a day late but I think its worth noting. The only big 'ah-ha' moment I heard in Sotomayor's Tuesday testimony where her words could have been used against her was as follows: Schumer was questioning Soto as follows (obviously trying to elicit a response that she does not decide cases based on sympathy but she inadvertantly replied in a way that left an opening concerning her actions regarding the Ricci case).

Schumer:'Here's another case- Washington v. County of Rockland- which was a case involving black correction officers who claimed that they were retaliated against after filing descrimination claims. Remember that claim?'

Soto:'I do'

Schumer:'Did you have sympathy for the officers filing that case?'

Soto:'Well to the extent that anyone believes they've been discriminated on the basis of race, that not only violates the law, but one would have I wouldn't use the word "sympathy"- but one would have a sense that this claim is of some importance and one that the court should very seriously consider.'

This was very near the end of Schumer's questioning and seemed like a perfect opportunity for Lindsey Graham (the next questioner) to point out her cursory dealing with the Ricci case but he totally missed it.

The dopey German Luther, not grasping the fact that the ridiculousness of the Jebu religion was finally fading away, harumphed and said that the Church was instead "corrupt" for its sale of indulgences and for the way the clergy comported itself, etc...See, old Luther believed the Jebu blather, while folks like the Medici knew it for the total lie it was. Anyway, Europe soon tore itself apart.

The white conservative, a fervent believer in equally Jebu-ish fantasies like "equality before the law" in a multi-racial nation, screams for Sotomayor to stick to the true spirit of the religious state. He doesn't want her to be partial to her ingroup at the expense of other groups. He wants her to believe in the multicult in the same way he does.

Think long and hard, reactionaries - will an overt multicult system, which is where we're headed, be any more harmful to your genetic interests than the soft one we live under currently?

The dopey German Luther, not grasping the fact that the ridiculousness of the Jebu religion was finally fading away, harumphed and said that the Church was instead "corrupt" for its sale of indulgences and for the way the clergy comported itself, etc...See, old Luther believed the Jebu blather, while folks like the Medici knew it for the total lie it was. Anyway, Europe soon tore itself apart.

I would like to point out that religion was not the only motivation for the Reformation. The Vatican was the head of a pan-European government much worse than the current EU superstate. The northern territories of the Vatican's empire decided they wanted out of system that both morally and politically corrupt. So yes, Europe did tear itself apart after Luther stood up to the church, but it had to happen if there was to be honest government and later an enlightenment.

Whatever his private theological beliefs, Luther was a great and necessary man.

The Medicis were atheists im pectore, but they were never public atheists. You could not be a public atheist anywhere in Christendom until probably 1850 and be taken seriously (even if not drawn and quartered), and in America you still can not. Luther picked his battles well if he was a closet unbeliever, and if a True Believer, still he smashed the power of the papacy-with the help of technology via the printing press.

I would like to point out that religion was not the only motivation for the Reformation. The Vatican was the head of a pan-European government much worse than the current EU superstate.

Not so. With the competition between two authorities - secular and Church - the population had a greater degree of freedom. See, e.g., Brian Tierney's "Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300" (pp. 1-2):

To maintain order and unity in groups larger and less homogeneous than extended family systems is a complex and difficult task.... The truly exceptional thing is that in medieval times there were always at least two claimants to the role [of supreme spiritual and temporal power], each commanding a formidable apparatus of government, and that for century after century neither was able to dominate the other completely, so that the duality persisted, was eventually rationalized in works of political theory and ultimately built into the structure of European society.... The very existence of two power structures competing for men's allegiance instead of only one compelling obedience greatly enhanced the possibilities for human freedom.

"The Medicis were atheists im pectore, but they were never public atheists."

That's my point. The Sotomayors are becoming public atheists - that is, exhibiting displays of reality for a broader world to witness. Why try to stop the flower from blooming?

"You could not be a public atheist anywhere in Christendom until probably 1850 and be taken seriously (even if not drawn and quartered), and in America you still can not."

Also my point. That's how it is when True Believers in weird myths take the upperhand. How long was this intellectual freedom (i.e. the freedom to say out loud that it was fairly possible that a magic sky god didn't control the world) delayed because of the reactionary Luther types? How long will the current clime be extended by reactionary Luther types? Let life reassert itself.

Not so. With the competition between two authorities - secular and Church - the population had a greater degree of freedom. See, e.g., Brian Tierney's "Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300" (pp. 1-2):

If medieval Europe under the Vatican provided so much freedom then why was there no flowering of knowledge until the Reformation? Why did all of these great advances have to wait until the power of the Vatican over Europe was broken?

Britain was the leading state to break with Rome and have defensible borders that could reasonably repel an invasion, and in the centuries following the defeat of the Spanish Armada* went on to become the leading economic power in Europe. Britain also developed the Common Law which included modern property law as we know it and enshrined liberty under law as a right of the common people.

* The Pope should have had the king of Spain send a million Spanish peasants offering to pick the crops of England and do the jobs that the English "just won't do" if he really wanted to destroy Protestantism.

"* The Pope should have had the king of Spain send a million Spanish peasants offering to pick the crops of England and do the jobs that the English "just won't do" if he really wanted to destroy Protestantism."

"If medieval Europe under the Vatican provided so much freedom then why was there no flowering of knowledge until the Reformation? Why did all of these great advances have to wait until the power of the Vatican over Europe was broken?"

Again, Ronduck, this shows a decided lack of historical knowledge. Haskins has produced probably the best known work in the Anglosphere on the subject, "The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century". And that's just one century. You can hop back a few more and look up "the Carolingian Renaissance". Sure, there was a bad century or two - e.g. end of the sixth up to the time of Karl Magnus. But that, again, was because a bunch of Christlings were doing all they could to break with Europe's past.

All of the supposed renaissances you mention were false starts. The takeoff finally occurred after the Reformation.

I can point to the technical progress the Soviet Union made in physics, reactor construction, missile design, spaceflight, electrification, but that doesn't justify the overall Soviet system. In the same vein, I can point to the preservation of knowledge among the clergy, and occasional false starts, but that doesn't justify the Vatican's rule during the Dark Ages.

Second, your blaming "Christlings" when I am pointing out the failure, and depravity, of a government is a lot like Stalin blaming rightist saboteurs for the failure of Soviet economic planning.

Sigh. Like I said, your Protestant worldview and my biocultural one don't mesh.

Lorenzo as I see it there are only two ways to interpret the events that happened before and during the Reformation.

1. From the viewpoint of the Vatican

2. From the Viewpoint of the rebels (Protestants).

Judging by your screenname I could swear you are arguing #1 and stating that the Vatican's rule would have improved over time without the Protestant rebellion. Maybe I am wrong and you are arguing for a third interpretation, but right now it seems you adhere to #1 while camouflaging it as "biocultural".

Lorenzo was chosen due to the exigencies of my original post, which only tangentially touched on where you've led it. You could have figured that out on your own, I think.

No, I won't elucidate. We're different ages. We've led completely different lives. We have, as previously mentioned, completely different worldviews. You believe in Jebu. I don't. That's a chasm that can't be bridged. Nothing I say would change anything you believe. Nor would I care for it to.

Because usually the opposite isn't true. Generally, repressed societies achieve squat (China under Mao), while free societies (Taiwan, Hong kong) frequently achieve remarkable gains in living standards, technical prowess and literature. The lack of widespread scientific progress, low living standards, and mass illiteracy so bad that many priests were illiterate during the time of the Vatican's rule over Europe is excellent evidence of a repressed society.

And why wouldn't we expect decentralized power and decentralized knowledge to coincide?

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